Starving Syrians in Madaya Are Denied Aid Amid Political Jockeying

BEIRUT, Lebanon — In the hills near the Lebanese border, an hour’s drive from downtown Damascus, much of a Syrian town is starving, according to residents and international humanitarian workers.

The town, Madaya, is controlled by rebels and encircled by pro-government forces with barbed wire, land mines and snipers. The people in the town make soups of grass, spices and olive leaves. They eat donkeys and cats. They arrive, collapsing, at a clinic that offers little but rehydration salts. Ne...

About 400,000 Syrians are trapped behind front lines, denied access to food and medicine. That United Nations count has risen from 240,000 since 2014, when the United Nations Security Council unanimously adopted a binding resolution ordering the warring parties to allow aid delivery.

, once classified as a middle-income country, now reports periodic malnutrition deaths. At least 28 people, including six babies, have died from hunger-related causes at a clinic in Madaya aided by , medics there say. And the 42,000 people that the counts as trapped in Madaya are about a tenth of those stranded in besieged or hard-to-reach areas as conditions grow steadily worse.

Five more people, a 9-year-old boy and four men older than 45, died on Sunday of suspected malnutrition, according to the medics working with , who said that 10 more people needed immediate hospitalization to survive, and that 200 more could reach that state in a week. “Madaya is now effectively an open-air prison,” the medical charity’s operations director, Brice de le Vingne, said in a statement.

This is happening as the United Nations plans a new round of peace talks for Jan. 25. It is happening amid escalating military interventions by Russia and the United States. And in some ways, according to diplomats and humanitarian workers, it is happening not just despite those efforts, but also because of them, as the warring parties flout international law while being courted for negotiations.

“In the revolution I was dreaming of democracy, freedom,” Hamoudi said slowly in an interview via Skype, exhaustion evident in his voice. “Today all my dreams are food. I want to eat. I don’t want to die from starvation.”